6/12/2023

Last week’s curation at RealClear’s American Civics portal starts off with Elliott Drago’s latest post at the Jack Miller Center’s American Arc blog. This post features Drago interviewing historian and JMC faculty partner Mark David Hall on his new book, which explores the influence of Christianity on realizing America’s founding principles across the nation. “My argument is that, on balance,” Hall says, “Christianity has been a force for the advancement of liberty and equality from the Puritans to the present day.” Hall notes that religious accommodations that protect pacifists, monuments being constructed that include religious language, and public funds going to private religious schools are all constitutional according to the American founders—but unconstitutional according to 20th century Supreme Court jurisprudence. Americans should embrace the idea that “everyone has a natural right to worship God according to the dictates of conscience and, we might add, to act upon his or her religious convictions whenever possible,” ideas that Hall says are in the spirit of what the founders believed. As he concludes, “Collectively, the founders were very concerned for religious liberty, and they wanted it to be robustly protected. Thank goodness they were coming to recognize that everyone enjoys their rights to religious liberty, not just Protestants, and not just Christians.”

The American Mind featured Daniel J. Mahoney’s recent speech at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, where he was given an award for his book, “The Statesman as Thinker: Portraits of Greatness, Courage, and Moderation.” He argues that we must recover the very category of statesmanship, which concerns “the twin virtues of magnanimity and moderation,” being comprised by a “greatness of soul and a deeply-felt sense of obligation to truth, liberty, and conscience.” But even more, “what towers above and truly endures is the admittedly rare combination of honorable ambition and self-conscious self-limitation, where greatness and goodness coexist in (relative) harmony, if in some tension.” He contrasts this high and classical view of the most vaunted political type to our present-day political fanatics, who make “a mockery of the shared bonds that make free civic life possible,” thus creating “a fictive world of permanent victims and oppressors.” Mahoney counsels us to begin a project of “moral recovery and civilizational renewal” that will undoubtedly “demand an exercise of grandeur and moderation that will test our mettle as free and civilized men and women.”